Sunday, February 9, 2014

Post Card Images of Your Ancestor's church

Churches
When this site started in 2001 the idea was to have one page of information and pictures of every town and village in Hertfordshire. Since then things have grown like topsy and some places have 20 or more pages of information. As a result it is easy to overlook the fact that the site includes 100+ year old pictures of nearly every parish church in the county. I have decided provide a quick access path to church information to make it easy for you to find pictures, and other information, of the church where your ancestor was baptised, married and/or buried.

The long term plan is to have a page for each ancient parish church, with comparatively high resolution picture from old post cards and, in some cases engravings, together with 19th century descriptions of the church, and other relevant information. In many cases this will mean moving church information off the appropriate town or village page, scanning the original post cards at a higher resolution, possibly adding completely new images, and adding appropriate early descriptions from my library. Because of the number of churches this will be an ongoing operation lasting at least a year.

The first stage has been to create a Parish Church "Home" Page - with links to the pictures already on this site, together with information on where you you can find additional information elsewhere on the web, including modern photographs of the churches. In addition index pages with thumbs for each of the churches have been created and those for the letters A, B, DEF, G, IJK, and T have already been populated. The other letters will be populated over the next couple of weeks.

In many cases the thumbs point to a dedicated page for the church, while in other cases they point to the first pictures of the church on the relevant town or village page. This means that you can quickly find the pictures of the church your ancestor used. Updating the individual church pages will be done on a priority basis - depending on demand. If you look for a church and would like higher resolution pictures, or more information, just tell me, or comment below. (It could help if you mention the nature of your interest as I might be able to find, for instance, a relevant memorial inscription to use as an example.) This will mean that the most popular churches will be given priority, and I don't waste my time updating information on churches no one is interested in. Don't be shy about asking. By asking you will ensure that the upgraded information will be available to other people visiting the site.

Any comments as to how easy you find the new facility is to use, and suggestions for improvement, will be very welcome.

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